1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to correcting metadata that has become inaccurate.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, computer systems constantly store and update metadata that is generated based on the operations of the system. A system may store metadata for multiple reasons, such as to allow the system to perform certain functions, to provide information to users interacting with the system, and to allow system administrators to determine the status of the system, determine usage characteristics of the system, or identify and correct problems in the system. For example, in a video hosting service that allows users to access videos that are available over the Internet, the service will generally maintain metadata about the usage of the service. Examples of such usage metadata include the number of times a video has been viewed, the number of comments a video has received, the number of videos a user has watched, and the number of favorite videos a user has.
When metadata is updated, the metadata may not be updated correctly due to software, hardware, or network problems, which results in the metadata no longer being accurate. For example, instead of being incremented, a count may erroneously be decremented or not changed at all. Since the metadata is constantly being used by a system, it is important that the metadata is accurate. However, when a system maintains a large amount of metadata it is difficult and inefficient to review all of the system's metadata to determine which metadata is inaccurate and needs to be corrected.